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The Kerala govt is introducing a Bill for tenant farming nine years after the NITI Aayog released the Model Land Leasing Act in 2016. (File photo)
The Kerala government is all set to introduce a Bill to give legal sanctity to lease farming – a move that officials expect will be a game changer for a state where large tracts of land remain fallow.
According to officials, lease farming will give a big boost to agriculture start-ups, which need large tracts of land for hi-tech and scientific farming. Mechanisation of agriculture will also get a fillip once large tracts of land are available for commercial cultivation.
“The Kerala Bill will be modelled after Andhra Pradesh’s tenant farmer bill, which was passed in 2019 as Andhra Pradesh Crop Cultivator Rights Act,” one official said.
Tenant farming is a system in which landowners lease out their land to those who don’t own them. The terms of lease farming include that a tenant pays the landowner for cultivating the land for a period agreed between them.
According to sources, the state currently has 1,03,334 hectares of fallow land, of which 49,420 ha are permanently fallow. The remaining 53,914 ha have been classified under ‘current fallow’, or lying unused in recent times.
“In Kerala, 35 percent of horticulture and vegetable production is through tenant farming, though such practices violate the provisions of Kerala Land Reforms Act. At present, tenant farming is done according to an agreement between a land owner and a tenant for a particular period. By legalising this contract, tenant farmers will be able to access bank loans, crop insurance and other benefits,” the official said, calling it a “win-win” for both sides.
The official added: “Banks and financial lenders in Kerala have been demanding a legal stamp for tenant farming for better credit flow to the agriculture sector”.
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Kerala, according to one official, has vast tracts of land due to various reasons – migration of youths, labour shortage and declining agricultural income.
“Many expatriates have left their land fallow in Kerala as they cannot run the routine farm works. Aged farmers also find it difficult to keep farming going on. Once legal provisions for lease farming are in place, such people will be ready to hand over their land for lease farming even as the ownership on land remains intact,” one official said, adding that cultivable land is also available with various departments.
Kerala is introducing a Bill for tenant farming nine years after the NITI Aayog released the Model Land Leasing Act in 2016. It was meant to give a legal framework for lease farming. Subsequently, states such as Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Andhra Pradesh framed lease farming laws.
In Kerala, discussions for such a law have been ongoing at various levels.
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